Quiet, the power of introverts in a world that cant stop talking susan cain

MORE ADVANCE NOISE FOR QUIET
“An intriguing and potentially life-altering examination of the human psyche
that is sure to benefit both introverts and extroverts alike.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Gentle is powerful … Solitude is socially productive … These important
counterintuitive ideas are among the many reasons to take Quiet to a quiet corner
and absorb its brilliant, thought-provoking message.”
—ROSABETH MOSS KANTER, professor at Harvard Business School, author of
Confidence and SuperCorp
“An informative, well-researched book on the power of quietness and the virtues of
having a rich inner life. It dispels the myth that you have to be extroverted to be happy
and successful.”
—JUDITH ORLOFF, M.D., author of Emotional Freedom
“In this engaging and beautifully written book, Susan Cain makes a powerful case for
the wisdom of introspection. She also warns us ably about the downside to our culture’s
noisiness, including all that it risks drowning out. Above the din, Susan’s own voice
remains a compelling presence—thoughtful, generous, calm, and eloquent. Quiet
deserves a very large readership.”
—CHRISTOPHER LANE, author of Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness
“Susan Cain’s quest to understand introversion, a beautifully wrought journey from
the lab bench to the motivational speaker’s hall, oers convincing evidence for
valuing substance over style, steak over sizzle, and qualities that are, in America, often
derided. This book is brilliant, profound, full of feeling and brimming with
insights.”
—SHERI FINK, M.D., author of War Hospital
“Brilliant, illuminating, empowering! Quiet gives not only a voice, but a path to
homecoming for so many who’ve walked through the better part of their lives thinking
the way they engage with the world is something in need of fixing.”
—JONATHAN FIELDS, author of Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for
Brilliance

“Once in a blue moon, a book comes along that gives us startling new insights.
Quiet is that book: it’s part page-turner, part cutting-edge science. The implications for
business are especially valuable: Quiet oers tips on how introverts can lead eectively,
give winning speeches, avoid burnout, and choose the right roles. This charming,
gracefully written, thoroughly researched book is simply masterful.”
—ADAM M. GRANT, PH.D., associate professor of management, the Wharton School of
Business
STILL MORE ADVANCE NOISE FOR QUIET
“Shatters misconceptions … Cain consistently holds the reader’s interest by presenting
individual proles … and reporting on the latest studies. Her diligence, research, and
passion for this important topic has richly paid off.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Quiet elevates the conversation about introverts in our outwardly oriented society to
new heights. I think that many introverts will discover that, even though they
didn’t know it, they have been waiting for this book all their lives.”
—ADAM S. MCHUGH, author of Introverts in the Church
“Susan Cain’s Quiet is wonderfully informative about the culture of the extravert ideal
and the psychology of a sensitive temperament, and she is helpfully perceptive about
how introverts can make the most of their personality preferences in all aspects of life.
Society needs introverts, so everyone can benet from the insights in this
important book.”
—JONATHAN M. CHEEK, professor of psychology at Wellesley College, co-editor of
Shyness: Perspectives on Research and Treatment
“A brilliant, important, and personally aecting book. Cain shows that, for all its
virtue, America’s Extrovert Ideal takes up way too much oxygen. Cain herself is the
perfect person to make this case—with winning grace and clarity she shows us
what it looks like to think outside the group.”
—CHRISTINE KENNEALLY, author of The First Word
“What Susan Cain understands—and readers of this fascinating volume will soon
appreciate—is something that psychology and our fast-moving and fast-talking society

have been all too slow to realize: Not only is there really nothing wrong with being
quiet, reective, shy, and introverted, but there are distinct advantages to being
this way.
—JAY BELSKY, Robert M. and Natalie Reid Dorn Professor, Human and Community
Development, University of California, Davis
“Author Susan Cain exemplies her own quiet power in this exquisitely written
and highly readable page-turner. She brings important research and the introvert
experience.”
—JENNIFER B. KAHNWEILER, PH.D., author of The Introverted Leader
“Several aspects of Quiet are remarkable. First, it is well informed by the research
literature but not held captive by it. Second, it is exceptionally well written, and
‘reader friendly.’ Third, it is insightful. I am sure many people wonder why brash,
impulsive behavior seems to be rewarded, whereas reective, thoughtful behavior is
overlooked. This book goes beyond such supercial impressions to a more penetrating
analysis.”
—WILLIAM GRAZIANO, professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue
University
Copyright © 2012 by Susan Cain
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The BIS/BAS Scales on this page–this page copyright © 1994 by the American Psychological Association. Adapted with
permission. From “Behavioral Inhibition, Behavioral Activation, and Aective Responses to Impending Reward and
Punishment: The BIS/BAS Scales.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67(2): 319–33. The use of APA information
does not imply endorsement by APA.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cain, Susan.

Quiet : the power of introverts in a world that can’t stop talking / Susan Cain.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Introverts. 2. Introversion. 3. Extroversion. 4. Interpersonal relations. I. Title.
BF698.35.I59C35 2012
155.2′32—dc22
2010053204
eISBN: 978-0-307-45220-7
Jacket design by Laura Duffy
Jacket photography by Joe Ginsberg/Getty Images
v3.1
To my childhood family
A species in which everyone was General Patton would not succeed, any more than would a
race in which everyone was Vincent van Gogh. I prefer to think that the planet needs athletes,
philosophers, sex symbols, painters, scientists; it needs the warmhearted, the hardhearted, the
coldhearted, and the weakhearted. It needs those who can devote their lives to studying how
many droplets of water are secreted by the salivary glands of dogs under which circumstances,
and it needs those who can capture the passing impression of cherry blossoms in a fourteen-
syllable poem or devote twenty-ve pages to the dissection of a small boy’s feelings as he lies
in bed in the dark waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight.… Indeed the presence of
outstanding strengths presupposes that energy needed in other areas has been channeled away
from them.
—ALLEN SHAWN
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
INTRODUCTION: The North and South of Temperament

PART ONE: THE EXTROVERT IDEAL
1. THE RISE OF THE “MIGHTY LIKEABLE FELLOW”: How Extroversion Became the Cultural Ideal
2. THE MYTH OF CHARISMATIC LEADERSHIP: The Culture of Personality, a Hundred Years Later
3. WHEN COLLABORATION KILLS CREATIVITY: The Rise of the New Groupthink and the Power of Working Alone
PART TWO: YOUR BIOLOGY, YOUR SELF?
4. IS TEMPERAMENT DESTINY?: Nature, Nurture, and the Orchid Hypothesis
5. BEYOND TEMPERAMENT: The Role of Free Will (and the Secret of Public Speaking for Introverts)
6. “FRANKLIN WAS A POLITICIAN, BUT ELEANOR SPOKE OUT OF CONSCIENCE”: Why Cool Is Overrated
7. WHY DID WALL STREET CRASH AND WARREN BUFFETT PROSPER?: How Introverts and Extroverts Think (and
Process Dopamine) Differently
PART THREE: DO ALL CULTURES HAVE AN EXTROVERT IDEAL?
8. SOFT POWER: Asian-Americans and the Extrovert Ideal
PART FOUR: HOW TO LOVE, HOW TO WORK
9. WHEN SHOULD YOU ACT MORE EXTROVERTED THAN YOU REALLY ARE?
10. THE COMMUNICATION GAP: How to Talk to Members of the Opposite Type
11. ON COBBLERS AND GENERALS: How to Cultivate Quiet Kids in a World That Can’t Hear Them
CONCLUSION: Wonderland
A Note on the Dedication
A Note on the Words Introvert and Extrovert
Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
Notes
Author’s Note
I have been working on this book ocially since 2005, and unocially for my entire
adult life. I have spoken and written to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people about
the topics covered inside, and have read as many books, scholarly papers, magazine
articles, chat-room discussions, and blog posts. Some of these I mention in the book;
others informed almost every sentence I wrote. Quiet stands on many shoulders,
especially the scholars and researchers whose work taught me so much. In a perfect
world, I would have named every one of my sources, mentors, and interviewees. But for

the sake of readability, some names appear only in the Notes or Acknowledgments.
For similar reasons, I did not use ellipses or brackets in certain quotations but made
sure that the extra or missing words did not change the speaker’s or writer’s meaning. If
you would like to quote these written sources from the original, the citations directing
you to the full quotations appear in the Notes.
I’ve changed the names and identifying details of some of the people whose stories I
tell, and in the stories of my own work as a lawyer and consultant. To protect the
privacy of the participants in Charles di Cagno’s public speaking workshop, who did not
plan to be included in a book when they signed up for the class, the story of my rst
evening in class is a composite based on several sessions; so is the story of Greg and
Emily, which is based on many interviews with similar couples. Subject to the
limitations of memory, all other stories are recounted as they happened or were told to
me. I did not fact-check the stories people told me about themselves, but only included
those I believed to be true.
INTRODUCTION
The North and South of Temperament
Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955. Early evening. A public bus pulls to a stop
and a sensibly dressed woman in her forties gets on. She carries herself erectly, despite
having spent the day bent over an ironing board in a dingy basement tailor shop at the
Montgomery Fair department store. Her feet are swollen, her shoulders ache. She sits in
the rst row of the Colored section and watches quietly as the bus lls with riders. Until
the driver orders her to give her seat to a white passenger.
The woman utters a single word that ignites one of the most important civil rights
protests of the twentieth century, one word that helps America find its better self.
The word is “No.”
The driver threatens to have her arrested.
“You may do that,” says Rosa Parks.
A police officer arrives. He asks Parks why she won’t move.
“Why do you all push us around?” she answers simply.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But the law is the law, and you’re under arrest.”

On the afternoon of her trial and conviction for disorderly conduct, the Montgomery
Improvement Association holds a rally for Parks at the Holt Street Baptist Church, in the
poorest section of town. Five thousand gather to support Parks’s lonely act of courage.
They squeeze inside the church until its pews can hold no more. The rest wait patiently
outside, listening through loudspeakers. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. addresses
the crowd. “There comes a time that people get tired of being trampled over by the iron
feet of oppression,” he tells them. “There comes a time when people get tired of being
pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life’s July and left standing amidst the piercing
chill of an Alpine November.”
He praises Parks’s bravery and hugs her. She stands silently, her mere presence
enough to galvanize the crowd. The association launches a city-wide bus boycott that
lasts 381 days. The people trudge miles to work. They carpool with strangers. They
change the course of American history.
I had always imagined Rosa Parks as a stately woman with a bold temperament,
someone who could easily stand up to a busload of glowering passengers. But when she
died in 2005 at the age of ninety-two, the ood of obituaries recalled her as soft-spoken,
sweet, and small in stature. They said she was “timid and shy” but had “the courage of a
lion.” They were full of phrases like “radical humility” and “quiet fortitude.” What does
it mean to be quiet and have fortitude? these descriptions asked implicitly. How could
you be shy and courageous?
Parks herself seemed aware of this paradox, calling her autobiography Quiet
Strength—a title that challenges us to question our assumptions. Why shouldn’t quiet be
strong? And what else can quiet do that we don’t give it credit for?
Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single
most important aspect of personality—the “north and south of temperament,” as one
scientist puts it—is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. Our place on this
continuum inuences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation,
resolve dierences, and show love. It aects the careers we choose and whether or not
we succeed at them. It governs how likely we are to exercise, commit adultery, function
well without sleep, learn from our mistakes, place big bets in the stock market, delay

gratication, be a good leader, and ask “what if.”
*
It’s reected in our brain pathways,
neurotransmitters, and remote corners of our nervous systems. Today introversion and
extroversion are two of the most exhaustively researched subjects in personality
psychology, arousing the curiosity of hundreds of scientists.
These researchers have made exciting discoveries aided by the latest technology, but
they’re part of a long and storied tradition. Poets and philosophers have been thinking
about introverts and extroverts since the dawn of recorded time. Both personality types
appear in the Bible and in the writings of Greek and Roman physicians, and some
evolutionary psychologists say that the history of these types reaches back even farther
than that: the animal kingdom also boasts “introverts” and “extroverts,” as we’ll see,
from fruit ies to pumpkinseed sh to rhesus monkeys. As with other complementary
pairings—masculinity and femininity, East and West, liberal and conservative—
humanity would be unrecognizable, and vastly diminished, without both personality
styles.
Take the partnership of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.: a formidable orator
refusing to give up his seat on a segregated bus wouldn’t have had the same eect as a
modest woman who’d clearly prefer to keep silent but for the exigencies of the situation.
And Parks didn’t have the stu to thrill a crowd if she’d tried to stand up and announce
that she had a dream. But with King’s help, she didn’t have to.
Yet today we make room for a remarkably narrow range of personality styles. We’re
told that to be great is to be bold, to be happy is to be sociable. We see ourselves as a
nation of extroverts—which means that we’ve lost sight of who we really are.
Depending on which study you consult, one third to one half of Americans are introverts
—in other words, one out of every two or three people you know. (Given that the United
States is among the most extroverted of nations, the number must be at least as high in
other parts of the world.) If you’re not an introvert yourself, you are surely raising,
managing, married to, or coupled with one.
If these statistics surprise you, that’s probably because so many people pretend to be

extroverts. Closet introverts pass undetected on playgrounds, in high school locker
rooms, and in the corridors of corporate America. Some fool even themselves, until some
life event—a layo, an empty nest, an inheritance that frees them to spend time as they
like—jolts them into taking stock of their true natures. You have only to raise the
subject of this book with your friends and acquaintances to nd that the most unlikely
people consider themselves introverts.
It makes sense that so many introverts hide even from themselves. We live with a
value system that I call the Extrovert Ideal—the omnipresent belief that the ideal self is
gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight. The archetypal extrovert prefers
action to contemplation, risk-taking to heed-taking, certainty to doubt. He favors quick
decisions, even at the risk of being wrong. She works well in teams and socializes in
groups. We like to think that we value individuality, but all too often we admire one
type of individual—the kind who’s comfortable “putting himself out there.” Sure, we
allow technologically gifted loners who launch companies in garages to have any
personality they please, but they are the exceptions, not the rule, and our tolerance
extends mainly to those who get fabulously wealthy or hold the promise of doing so.
Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a
second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology.
Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted
because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously
appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which
most of us feel we must conform.
The Extrovert Ideal has been documented in many studies, though this research has
never been grouped under a single name. Talkative people, for example, are rated as
smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends. Velocity of
speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable
than slow ones. The same dynamics apply in groups, where research shows that the
voluble are considered smarter than the reticent—even though there’s zero correlation
between the gift of gab and good ideas. Even the word introvert is stigmatized—one
informal study, by psychologist Laurie Helgoe, found that introverts described their own

physical appearance in vivid language (“green-blue eyes,” “exotic,” “high cheekbones”),
but when asked to describe generic introverts they drew a bland and distasteful picture
(“ungainly,” “neutral colors,” “skin problems”).
But we make a grave mistake to embrace the Extrovert Ideal so unthinkingly. Some of
our greatest ideas, art, and inventions—from the theory of evolution to van Gogh’s
sunowers to the personal computer—came from quiet and cerebral people who knew
how to tune in to their inner worlds and the treasures to be found there. Without
introverts, the world would be devoid of:
the theory of gravity
the theory of relativity
W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming”
Chopin’s nocturnes
Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
Peter Pan
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm
The Cat in the Hat
Charlie Brown
Schindler’s List, E.T., and Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Google
Harry Potter
*
As the science journalist Winifred Gallagher writes: “The glory of the disposition that
stops to consider stimuli rather than rushing to engage with them is its long association
with intellectual and artistic achievement. Neither E=mc
2
nor Paradise Lost was dashed
o by a party animal.” Even in less obviously introverted occupations, like nance,
politics, and activism, some of the greatest leaps forward were made by introverts. In
this book we’ll see how gures like Eleanor Roosevelt, Al Gore, Warren Buett, Gandhi
—and Rosa Parks—achieved what they did not in spite of but because of their

introversion.
Yet, as Quiet will explore, many of the most important institutions of contemporary
life are designed for those who enjoy group projects and high levels of stimulation. As
children, our classroom desks are increasingly arranged in pods, the better to foster
group learning, and research suggests that the vast majority of teachers believe that the
ideal student is an extrovert. We watch TV shows whose protagonists are not the
“children next door,” like the Cindy Bradys and Beaver Cleavers of yesteryear, but rock
stars and webcast hostesses with outsized personalities, like Hannah Montana and Carly
Shay of iCarly. Even Sid the Science Kid, a PBS-sponsored role model for the preschool
set, kicks o each school day by performing dance moves with his pals. (“Check out my
moves! I’m a rock star!”)
As adults, many of us work for organizations that insist we work in teams, in oces
without walls, for supervisors who value “people skills” above all. To advance our
careers, we’re expected to promote ourselves unabashedly. The scientists whose research
gets funded often have condent, perhaps overcondent, personalities. The artists
whose work adorns the walls of contemporary museums strike impressive poses at
gallery openings. The authors whose books get published—once accepted as a reclusive
breed—are now vetted by publicists to make sure they’re talk-show ready. (You
wouldn’t be reading this book if I hadn’t convinced my publisher that I was enough of a
pseudo-extrovert to promote it.)
If you’re an introvert, you also know that the bias against quiet can cause deep
psychic pain. As a child you might have overheard your parents apologize for your
shyness. (“Why can’t you be more like the Kennedy boys?” the Camelot-besotted parents
of one man I interviewed repeatedly asked him.) Or at school you might have been
prodded to come “out of your shell”—that noxious expression which fails to appreciate
that some animals naturally carry shelter everywhere they go, and that some humans
are just the same. “All the comments from childhood still ring in my ears, that I was
lazy, stupid, slow, boring,” writes a member of an e-mail list called Introvert Retreat.
“By the time I was old enough to gure out that I was simply introverted, it was a part
of my being, the assumption that there is something inherently wrong with me. I wish I

could find that little vestige of doubt and remove it.”
Now that you’re an adult, you might still feel a pang of guilt when you decline a
dinner invitation in favor of a good book. Or maybe you like to eat alone in restaurants
and could do without the pitying looks from fellow diners. Or you’re told that you’re “in
your head too much,” a phrase that’s often deployed against the quiet and cerebral.
Of course, there’s another word for such people: thinkers.
I have seen rsthand how dicult it is for introverts to take stock of their own talents,
and how powerful it is when nally they do. For more than ten years I trained people of
all stripes—corporate lawyers and college students, hedge-fund managers and married
couples—in negotiation skills. Of course, we covered the basics: how to prepare for a
negotiation, when to make the rst oer, and what to do when the other person says
“take it or leave it.” But I also helped clients gure out their natural personalities and
how to make the most of them.
My very rst client was a young woman named Laura. She was a Wall Street lawyer,
but a quiet and daydreamy one who dreaded the spotlight and disliked aggression. She
had managed somehow to make it through the crucible of Harvard Law School—a place
where classes are conducted in huge, gladiatorial amphitheaters, and where she once got
so nervous that she threw up on the way to class. Now that she was in the real world,
she wasn’t sure she could represent her clients as forcefully as they expected.
For the rst three years on the job, Laura was so junior that she never had to test this
premise. But one day the senior lawyer she’d been working with went on vacation,
leaving her in charge of an important negotiation. The client was a South American
manufacturing company that was about to default on a bank loan and hoped to
renegotiate its terms; a syndicate of bankers that owned the endangered loan sat on the
other side of the negotiating table.
Laura would have preferred to hide under said table, but she was accustomed to
ghting such impulses. Gamely but nervously, she took her spot in the lead chair,
anked by her clients: general counsel on one side and senior nancial ocer on the
other. These happened to be Laura’s favorite clients: gracious and soft-spoken, very
dierent from the master-of-the-universe types her rm usually represented. In the past,

Laura had taken the general counsel to a Yankees game and the nancial ocer
shopping for a handbag for her sister. But now these cozy outings—just the kind of
socializing Laura enjoyed—seemed a world away. Across the table sat nine disgruntled
investment bankers in tailored suits and expensive shoes, accompanied by their lawyer,
a square-jawed woman with a hearty manner. Clearly not the self-doubting type, this
woman launched into an impressive speech on how Laura’s clients would be lucky
simply to accept the bankers’ terms. It was, she said, a very magnanimous offer.
Everyone waited for Laura to reply, but she couldn’t think of anything to say. So she
just sat there. Blinking. All eyes on her. Her clients shifting uneasily in their seats. Her
thoughts running in a familiar loop: I’m too quiet for this kind of thing, too unassuming, too
cerebral. She imagined the person who would be better equipped to save the day:
someone bold, smooth, ready to pound the table. In middle school this person, unlike
Laura, would have been called “outgoing,” the highest accolade her seventh-grade
classmates knew, higher even than “pretty,” for a girl, or “athletic,” for a guy. Laura
promised herself that she only had to make it through the day. Tomorrow she would go
look for another career.
Then she remembered what I’d told her again and again: she was an introvert, and as
such she had unique powers in negotiation—perhaps less obvious but no less formidable.
She’d probably prepared more than everyone else. She had a quiet but rm speaking
style. She rarely spoke without thinking. Being mild-mannered, she could take strong,
even aggressive, positions while coming across as perfectly reasonable. And she tended
to ask questions—lots of them—and actually listen to the answers, which, no matter
what your personality, is crucial to strong negotiation.
So Laura finally started doing what came naturally.
“Let’s go back a step. What are your numbers based on?” she asked.
“What if we structured the loan this way, do you think it might work?”
“That way?”
“Some other way?”
At rst her questions were tentative. She picked up steam as she went along, posing
them more forcefully and making it clear that she’d done her homework and wouldn’t

concede the facts. But she also stayed true to her own style, never raising her voice or
losing her decorum. Every time the bankers made an assertion that seemed
unbudgeable, Laura tried to be constructive. “Are you saying that’s the only way to go?
What if we took a different approach?”
Eventually her simple queries shifted the mood in the room, just as the negotiation
textbooks say they will. The bankers stopped speechifying and dominance-posing,
activities for which Laura felt hopelessly ill-equipped, and they started having an actual
conversation.
More discussion. Still no agreement. One of the bankers revved up again, throwing his
papers down and storming out of the room. Laura ignored this display, mostly because
she didn’t know what else to do. Later on someone told her that at that pivotal moment
she’d played a good game of something called “negotiation jujitsu”; but she knew that
she was just doing what you learn to do naturally as a quiet person in a loudmouth
world.
Finally the two sides struck a deal. The bankers left the building, Laura’s favorite
clients headed for the airport, and Laura went home, curled up with a book, and tried to
forget the day’s tensions.
But the next morning, the lead lawyer for the bankers—the vigorous woman with the
strong jaw—called to oer her a job. “I’ve never seen anyone so nice and so tough at
the same time,” she said. And the day after that, the lead banker called Laura, asking if
her law rm would represent his company in the future. “We need someone who can
help us put deals together without letting ego get in the way,” he said.
By sticking to her own gentle way of doing things, Laura had reeled in new business
for her rm and a job oer for herself. Raising her voice and pounding the table was
unnecessary.
Today Laura understands that her introversion is an essential part of who she is, and
she embraces her reective nature. The loop inside her head that accused her of being
too quiet and unassuming plays much less often. Laura knows that she can hold her own
when she needs to.
What exactly do I mean when I say that Laura is an introvert? When I started writing

this book, the rst thing I wanted to nd out was precisely how researchers dene
introversion and extroversion. I knew that in 1921 the influential psychologist Carl Jung
had published a bombshell of a book, Psychological Types, popularizing the terms introvert
and extrovert as the central building blocks of personality. Introverts are drawn to the
inner world of thought and feeling, said Jung, extroverts to the external life of people
and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around
them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves. Introverts recharge their batteries
by being alone; extroverts need to recharge when they don’t socialize enough. If you’ve
ever taken a Myers-Briggs personality test, which is based on Jung’s thinking and used
by the majority of universities and Fortune 100 companies, then you may already be
familiar with these ideas.
But what do contemporary researchers have to say? I soon discovered that there is no
all-purpose denition of introversion or extroversion; these are not unitary categories,
like “curly-haired” or “sixteen-year-old,” in which everyone can agree on who qualies
for inclusion. For example, adherents of the Big Five school of personality psychology
(which argues that human personality can be boiled down to ve primary traits) dene
introversion not in terms of a rich inner life but as a lack of qualities such as
assertiveness and sociability. There are almost as many denitions of introvert and
extrovert as there are personality psychologists, who spend a great deal of time arguing
over which meaning is most accurate. Some think that Jung’s ideas are outdated; others
swear that he’s the only one who got it right.
Still, today’s psychologists tend to agree on several important points: for example,
that introverts and extroverts dier in the level of outside stimulation that they need to
function well. Introverts feel “just right” with less stimulation, as when they sip wine
with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle, or read a book. Extroverts enjoy the extra
bang that comes from activities like meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes, and
cranking up the stereo. “Other people are very arousing,” says the personality
psychologist David Winter, explaining why your typical introvert would rather spend
her vacation reading on the beach than partying on a cruise ship. “They arouse threat,
fear, ight, and love. A hundred people are very stimulating compared to a hundred

books or a hundred grains of sand.”
Many psychologists would also agree that introverts and extroverts work dierently.
Extroverts tend to tackle assignments quickly. They make fast (sometimes rash)
decisions, and are comfortable multitasking and risk-taking. They enjoy “the thrill of the
chase” for rewards like money and status.
Introverts often work more slowly and deliberately. They like to focus on one task at
a time and can have mighty powers of concentration. They’re relatively immune to the
lures of wealth and fame.
Our personalities also shape our social styles. Extroverts are the people who will add
life to your dinner party and laugh generously at your jokes. They tend to be assertive,
dominant, and in great need of company. Extroverts think out loud and on their feet;
they prefer talking to listening, rarely nd themselves at a loss for words, and
occasionally blurt out things they never meant to say. They’re comfortable with conict,
but not with solitude.
Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business
meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote
their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they
talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in
writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conict. Many have a horror of small
talk, but enjoy deep discussions.
A few things introverts are not: The word introvert is not a synonym for hermit or
misanthrope. Introverts can be these things, but most are perfectly friendly. One of the
most humane phrases in the English language—“Only connect!”—was written by the
distinctly introverted E. M. Forster in a novel exploring the question of how to achieve
“human love at its height.”
Nor are introverts necessarily shy. Shyness is the fear of social disapproval or
humiliation, while introversion is a preference for environments that are not
overstimulating. Shyness is inherently painful; introversion is not. One reason that
people confuse the two concepts is that they sometimes overlap (though psychologists
debate to what degree). Some psychologists map the two tendencies on vertical and

horizontal axes, with the introvert-extrovert spectrum on the horizontal axis, and the
anxious-stable spectrum on the vertical. With this model, you end up with four
quadrants of personality types: calm extroverts, anxious (or impulsive) extroverts, calm
introverts, and anxious introverts. In other words, you can be a shy extrovert, like
Barbra Streisand, who has a larger-than-life personality and paralyzing stage fright; or a
non-shy introvert, like Bill Gates, who by all accounts keeps to himself but is unfazed by
the opinions of others.
You can also, of course, be both shy and an introvert: T. S. Eliot was a famously
private soul who wrote in “The Waste Land” that he could “show you fear in a handful
of dust.” Many shy people turn inward, partly as a refuge from the socializing that
causes them such anxiety. And many introverts are shy, partly as a result of receiving
the message that there’s something wrong with their preference for reection, and
partly because their physiologies, as we’ll see, compel them to withdraw from high-
stimulation environments.
But for all their dierences, shyness and introversion have in common something
profound. The mental state of a shy extrovert sitting quietly in a business meeting may
be very dierent from that of a calm introvert—the shy person is afraid to speak up,
while the introvert is simply overstimulated—but to the outside world, the two appear
to be the same. This can give both types insight into how our reverence for alpha status
blinds us to things that are good and smart and wise. For very dierent reasons, shy and
introverted people might choose to spend their days in behind-the-scenes pursuits like
inventing, or researching, or holding the hands of the gravely ill—or in leadership
positions they execute with quiet competence. These are not alpha roles, but the people
who play them are role models all the same.
If you’re still not sure where you fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum, you can assess
yourself here. Answer each question “true” or “false,” choosing the answer that applies
to you more often than not.
*
1. _______ I prefer one-on-one conversations to group activities.
2. _______ I often prefer to express myself in writing.

3. _______ I enjoy solitude.
4. _______ I seem to care less than my peers about wealth, fame, and status.
5. _______ I dislike small talk, but I enjoy talking in depth about topics that matter to me.
6. _______ People tell me that I’m a good listener.
7. _______ I’m not a big risk-taker.
8. _______ I enjoy work that allows me to “dive in” with few interruptions.
9. _______ I like to celebrate birthdays on a small scale, with only one or two close friends or family members.
10. _______ People describe me as “soft-spoken” or “mellow.”
11. _______ I prefer not to show or discuss my work with others until it’s finished.
12. _______ I dislike conflict.
13. _______ I do my best work on my own.
14. _______ I tend to think before I speak.
15. _______ I feel drained after being out and about, even if I’ve enjoyed myself.
16. _______ I often let calls go through to voice mail.
17. _______ If I had to choose, I’d prefer a weekend with absolutely nothing to do to one with too many things
scheduled.
18. _______ I don’t enjoy multitasking.
19. _______ I can concentrate easily.
20. _______ In classroom situations, I prefer lectures to seminars.
The more often you answered “true,” the more introverted you probably are. If you
found yourself with a roughly equal number of “true” and “false” answers, then you may
be an ambivert—yes, there really is such a word.
But even if you answered every single question as an introvert or extrovert, that
doesn’t mean that your behavior is predictable across all circumstances. We can’t say
that every introvert is a bookworm or every extrovert wears lampshades at parties any
more than we can say that every woman is a natural consensus-builder and every man
loves contact sports. As Jung felicitously put it, “There is no such thing as a pure
extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.”
This is partly because we are all gloriously complex individuals, but also because there
are so many dierent kinds of introverts and extroverts. Introversion and extroversion

interact with our other personality traits and personal histories, producing wildly
dierent kinds of people. So if you’re an artistic American guy whose father wished
you’d try out for the football team like your rough-and-tumble brothers, you’ll be a very
dierent kind of introvert from, say, a Finnish businesswoman whose parents were
lighthouse keepers. (Finland is a famously introverted nation. Finnish joke: How can
you tell if a Finn likes you? He’s staring at your shoes instead of his own.)
Many introverts are also “highly sensitive,” which sounds poetic, but is actually a
technical term in psychology. If you are a sensitive sort, then you’re more apt than the
average person to feel pleasantly overwhelmed by Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” or a
well-turned phrase or an act of extraordinary kindness. You may be quicker than others
to feel sickened by violence and ugliness, and you likely have a very strong conscience.
When you were a child you were probably called “shy,” and to this day feel nervous
when you’re being evaluated, for example when giving a speech or on a rst date. Later
we’ll examine why this seemingly unrelated collection of attributes tends to belong to
the same person and why this person is often introverted. (No one knows exactly how
many introverts are highly sensitive, but we know that 70 percent of sensitives are
introverts, and the other 30 percent tend to report needing a lot of “down time.”)
All of this complexity means that not everything you read in Quiet will apply to you,
even if you consider yourself a true-blue introvert. For one thing, we’ll spend some time
talking about shyness and sensitivity, while you might have neither of these traits.
That’s OK. Take what applies to you, and use the rest to improve your relationships with
others.
Having said all this, in Quiet we’ll try not to get too hung up on denitions. Strictly
dening terms is vital for researchers whose studies depend on pinpointing exactly
where introversion stops and other traits, like shyness, start. But in Quiet we’ll concern
ourselves more with the fruit of that research. Today’s psychologists, joined by
neuroscientists with their brain-scanning machines, have unearthed illuminating insights
that are changing the way we see the world—and ourselves. They are answering
questions such as: Why are some people talkative while others measure their words?
Why do some people burrow into their work and others organize oce birthday parties?

Why are some people comfortable wielding authority while others prefer neither to lead
nor to be led? Can introverts be leaders? Is our cultural preference for extroversion in
the natural order of things, or is it socially determined? From an evolutionary
perspective, introversion must have survived as a personality trait for a reason—so
what might the reason be? If you’re an introvert, should you devote your energies to
activities that come naturally, or should you stretch yourself, as Laura did that day at
the negotiation table?
The answers might surprise you.
If there is only one insight you take away from this book, though, I hope it’s a
newfound sense of entitlement to be yourself. I can vouch personally for the life-
transforming eects of this outlook. Remember that rst client I told you about, the one
I called Laura in order to protect her identity?
That was a story about me. I was my own first client.
* Answer key: exercise: extroverts; commit adultery: extroverts; function well without sleep: introverts; learn from our
mistakes: introverts; place big bets: extroverts; delay gratication: introverts; be a good leader: in some cases introverts, in
other cases extroverts, depending on the type of leadership called for; ask “what if”: introverts.
* Sir Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, W. B. Yeats, Frédéric Chopin, Marcel Proust, J. M. Barrie, George Orwell, Theodor
Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Charles Schulz, Steven Spielberg, Larry Page, J. K. Rowling.
* This is an informal quiz, not a scientically validated personality test. The questions were formulated based on
characteristics of introversion often accepted by contemporary researchers.
Part
One
THE EXTROVERT IDEAL
1
THE RISE OF THE “MIGHTY LIKEABLE FELLOW”
How Extroversion Became the Cultural Ideal
Strangers’ eyes, keen and critical.
Can you meet them proudly—confidently—without fear?
—PRINT ADVERTISEMENT FOR WOODBURY’S SOAP, 1922
The date: 1902. The place: Harmony Church, Missouri, a tiny, dot-on-the-map town

located on a oodplain a hundred miles from Kansas City. Our young protagonist: a
good-natured but insecure high school student named Dale.
Skinny, unathletic, and fretful, Dale is the son of a morally upright but perpetually
bankrupt pig farmer. He respects his parents but dreads following in their poverty-
stricken footsteps. Dale worries about other things, too: thunder and lightning, going to
hell, and being tongue-tied at crucial moments. He even fears his wedding day: What if
he can’t think of anything to say to his future bride?
One day a Chautauqua speaker comes to town. The Chautauqua movement, born in
1873 and based in upstate New York, sends gifted speakers across the country to lecture
on literature, science, and religion. Rural Americans prize these presenters for the whi
of glamour they bring from the outside world—and their power to mesmerize an
audience. This particular speaker captivates the young Dale with his own rags-to-riches
tale: once he’d been a lowly farm boy with a bleak future, but he developed a
charismatic speaking style and took the stage at Chautauqua. Dale hangs on his every
word.
A few years later, Dale is again impressed by the value of public speaking. His family
moves to a farm three miles outside of Warrensburg, Missouri, so he can attend college
there without paying room and board. Dale observes that the students who win campus
speaking contests are seen as leaders, and he resolves to be one of them. He signs up for
every contest and rushes home at night to practice. Again and again he loses; Dale is
dogged, but not much of an orator. Eventually, though, his eorts begin to pay o. He
transforms himself into a speaking champion and campus hero. Other students turn to
him for speech lessons; he trains them and they start winning, too.
By the time Dale leaves college in 1908, his parents are still poor, but corporate
America is booming. Henry Ford is selling Model Ts like griddle cakes, using the slogan
“for business and for pleasure.” J.C. Penney, Woolworth, and Sears Roebuck have
become household names. Electricity lights up the homes of the middle class; indoor
plumbing spares them midnight trips to the outhouse.
The new economy calls for a new kind of man—a salesman, a social operator,
someone with a ready smile, a masterful handshake, and the ability to get along with

colleagues while simultaneously outshining them. Dale joins the swelling ranks of
salesmen, heading out on the road with few possessions but his silver tongue.
Dale’s last name is Carnegie (Carnagey, actually; he changes the spelling later, likely
to evoke Andrew, the great industrialist). After a few grueling years selling beef for
Armour and Company, he sets up shop as a public-speaking teacher. Carnegie holds his
rst class at a YMCA night school on 125th Street in New York City. He asks for the
usual two-dollars-per-session salary for night school teachers. The Y’s director, doubting
that a public-speaking class will generate much interest, refuses to pay that kind of
money.
But the class is an overnight sensation, and Carnegie goes on to found the Dale
Carnegie Institute, dedicated to helping businessmen root out the very insecurities that
had held him back as a young man. In 1913 he publishes his rst book, Public Speaking
and Influencing Men in Business. “In the days when pianos and bathrooms were luxuries,”
Carnegie writes, “men regarded ability in speaking as a peculiar gift, needed only by
the lawyer, clergyman, or statesman. Today we have come to realize that it is the
indispensable weapon of those who would forge ahead in the keen competition of
business.”
Carnegie’s metamorphosis from farmboy to salesman to public-speaking icon is also the
story of the rise of the Extrovert Ideal. Carnegie’s journey reected a cultural evolution
that reached a tipping point around the turn of the twentieth century, changing forever
who we are and whom we admire, how we act at job interviews and what we look for
in an employee, how we court our mates and raise our children. America had shifted
from what the inuential cultural historian Warren Susman called a Culture of
Character to a Culture of Personality—and opened up a Pandora’s Box of personal
anxieties from which we would never quite recover.
In the Culture of Character, the ideal self was serious, disciplined, and honorable.
What counted was not so much the impression one made in public as how one behaved
in private. The word personality didn’t exist in English until the eighteenth century, and
the idea of “having a good personality” was not widespread until the twentieth.
But when they embraced the Culture of Personality, Americans started to focus on

how others perceived them. They became captivated by people who were bold and
entertaining. “The social role demanded of all in the new Culture of Personality was
that of a performer,” Susman famously wrote. “Every American was to become a
performing self.”
The rise of industrial America was a major force behind this cultural evolution. The
nation quickly developed from an agricultural society of little houses on the prairie to
an urbanized, “the business of America is business” powerhouse. In the country’s early
days, most Americans lived like Dale Carnegie’s family, on farms or in small towns,
interacting with people they’d known since childhood. But when the twentieth century
arrived, a perfect storm of big business, urbanization, and mass immigration blew the